The federal Endangered Species Act requires the government to protect endangered species from extinction. At first glance you might think this is a good thing for an endangered species act to do.
The Tribune’s beef against the act is “that it does not regard humans as a species in their own right, with their own place in the environment.” Leaving aside the interesting choice of pronouns (“their own place”? why not “our own place”?), just what does that assertion mean? Two hundred years ago humanity’s place in the Pacific Northwest was either along the banks of major rivers or on the shores of the Pacific and its various bays, inlets, straits, and sounds. The indigenous people regarded the forests as dark, damp, and scary places. They entered them only when necessary to harvest modest amounts of timber. They made their living from the waters.
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The Tribune has another reason for opposing the act in its present form. The act can, the paper tells us, be used for “mischief,” a means of thwarting “projects–airports, for example–that are opposed for other reasons.”
In the Pacific Northwest we are attacking a forest that took a millenium to grow, and if Bush has his way we will cut it down in another 25 years or so. Consuming at a rate more than ten times the rate of production may be perfect Reaganomics, but it is a long way from careful husbandry or a balanced approach to our relations with the rest of nature. When the last of the old-growth forests fall, there will be an economic collapse in the northwest. Large numbers of people will be thrown out of work. Whole towns will vanish. And the taxpayers will be left with the bill for rehabilitating the despoiled woodlands.
The hysterical right often claims that environmentalists are essentially terrorists. Our usual response is that we are not terrorists. You can negotiate with terrorists. However, in a spirit of compromise I offer what might be called the Daley alternative to a tough Endangered Species Act. Daley said we could destroy a forest to build the Lake Calumet airport because we could build a new forest to replace the one lost. So I would say that anyone who wants to destroy a species of owl can do so as soon as he learns to make a new kind of owl to replace the one lost. What could be more fair or more balanced?
